Chris Moyles: has the new Herod lost a king’s ransom?

As Radio 1 DJ Chris Moyles (pictured below) broadcasts his last for the BBC today and prepares to instead tread the boards for a living in the latest production of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Jesus Christ Superstar he may marvel at how far he, once just a cassock-wearing Leeds schoolboy with a gift for the gab, has come.

While he lives in a £2 million house in fashionable Highgate, North London with George Michael for a neighbour and drives Audi and Mercedes supercars, his beginnings were more humble.

In 2009 Moyles visited his former childhood home in Temple Moor, Leeds, for TV programme Who Do You Think You Are and while touring the unfurnished property, marveled at its cramped kitchen.

But what the programme didn’t explain is why the house stood empty and un-sold even though his parents had long moved out; the semi (pictured below), named ‘Verona’ after his mother, had been empty for over two years.

His parents, Chris and Harriet Veronica (or Vera) had moved home in 2007 five miles north to the substantially more affluent suburban village of Shadwell near Leeds Golf Club and recently appeared with Moyles, his then girlfriend Sophie Waite and brother Kieron on Celebrity Family Fortunes.

And the family lived up to the TV show’s name. Chris and Vera, who are both retired, were by then living in a £430,000 four-bedroom detached house without a mortgage, suggesting that their then £1m-a-year salaried son gave them a helping hand up the property ladder.

But the Moyles family held on to their original family home to their financial detriment – the three bedroom house appears to have stood empty for two years, was then listed for sale at £169,950 in October 2011 but didn’t find a buyer until May this year despite a £10,000 price drop to £159,000. It finally sold for £150,000.